Magento or PrestaShop: Which One Is For You?

Choosing the shopping cart for online business that will bring a desirable success, is downright crucial. Are you dazed by the redundancy of competing shopping cart solutions, and can not decide which one is better? It is not an easy task even for an eCommerce professional.

When browsing through the net for a shopping cart that will suit you the most, you must have noticed that Magento and PrestaShop are the most frequently discussed platforms on popular forums and shopping cart review blogs.

Definitely, they are the 2 most popular solutions. They both are the owners of a perfect reputation, and constantly prove it striving to enhance store functionality by adding a number of unique and useful options.

Even the statistics provided by Cart2Cart migration service shows that Magento firmly stands on the top position in the ranking for the most popular platforms. PrestaShop stands on the second position. The rest shopping carts make up a smaller share.

Nevertheless, the choice should be deliberated. So, lets try to compare Magento and PrestaShop, to find the differences by detecting what they offer, their benefits and shortcomings.

We will start from Magento. Magento is designed in a clear and simple way and offers scalable architecture, developed professional support, and effortless integration with 3rd party apps. It is a shopping cart which unites the biggest ecommerce online community circle. It is created for entrepreneurs who want to have a perfectly stable store with unlimited flexibility and a number of features which help to increase revenue by attracting more shoppers and increasing conversion.

Magento’s closest rival – PrestaShop, is considered to be one of the most reliable open-source software. The shopping cart attracts users by its simplicity, user-friendly interface and functionality (as it was launched with more than 300 features out of the box). Even a merchant who hasn’t dealt with Presta before will certainly cope with it easily.

Let’s try to compare the benefits and loses in details to decide which one meets your requirements the most:

PrestaShop vs. Magento

Open Source

Both platforms: Magento and PrestaShop are open source. It is a significant advantage as store owners will get all the features and tools to manage a product catalog without any charge and fees.

Produced for

Magento is a solution created particularly for large-scale e-commerce retailers, at the same time PrestaShop offers limited facilities for ecommerce, that’s why it better suits for small and medium sized business.

Installation & Ease of Use

PrestaShop get the preference over Magento when it comes to the installation, and it should not be a problem for anybody- even for beginners in this sphere. Though Magento is not as easy as Presta but has more features included.

Community & Customer support

The online community and technical support team of Magento is more developed than in Presta. That makes Magento more preferred among users. PrestaShop does not offer an official support, instead, users can rely only on a community forum.

Speed

Swift speed of PrestaShop overtakes Magento that is a bit slow unless hosted on a well configured server.

SEO

One feature that gives Magento an edge over Prestashop – is Search Engine Optimization. It is more powerful not only than Presta, but even than others popular eCommerce platforms.

Software Size

Well, PrestaShop software is much smaller than Magento. Its size is 15MB comparing to Magento 26.67MB. It makes quite understandable that Magento can offer a greater number of services and facilities required by the better functionality for ecommerce stores.

Themes & Design

Here, both platforms are almost equal. One benefit for PrestaShop – is its customizable design. There are lots of free themes available, but they are not updated frequently though. Magento also offers a large number of themes to its users, and they are good enough to catch the users attention.

Modules

Modules for Magento can cost much less than for PrestaShop. Also, having a desire, you may find them not just fairly priced, but even free.

Unique Features

Functional features of Magento like customer groups, multiple stores administration by one admin, wish list, product comparison, RSS feed are not available for Presta.

On the other hand, statistics, shipping tracking in Presta are far ahead of Magento in this issue.
The big benefit – it supports over 40 languages, but only English and French have full support in all releases.

Additional number of features and functionality are available for extra cost for both shopping carts.

Between the two

So, does Magento beat PrestaShop? NO. Does PrestaShop beat Magento ? NO again! The important thing is to determine your individual inquiries, and to chose the one that will suit your business model the most.

If you own not a huge store with thousands of products and hundred of categories and you don’t have professional technical skills to manage your shop, then go ahead and use Presta. If you plan to develop business to the tremendous sizes, or even create multiple stores it’s better to use Magento. This platform is more robust and has a dedicated professional support team.

So, its up to you, make your decision according to the personal preferences. And let your choice will bring you the desirable success.

This article is written by Halia Vilchynska. She is the Marketing Assistant at MagneticOne, an innovative software company, developer of Cart2Cart. If you wish to write for HBB, kindly check this.

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nice post, I like it . Just because Magento – simply beats the competitors, I knew it!
From the functions you listed below, I am interested in multi store functionality, I think it would be great to discuss it in your future post and also about Magento Amazon. How about this?